Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris should apologize before all victims of the Third Reich for comparing her Republican rival Donald Trump to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, a Holocaust survivor has said in a video released by Trump’s campaign.
The clip, which was posted on social media on Friday, featured Jerry Wartski, a 94-year-old who had been a prisoner at the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Second World War. Wartski has spent most of his life in the US, working as a real estate investor. He is now an honorary president of the Israel Heritage Foundation (IHF), which describes itself as a bipartisan, pro-Israel NGO.
"Adolf Hitler invaded Poland [in 1939] when I was nine years old. He murdered my parents and most of our family. I know more about Hitler than [Harris] will ever know in a thousand lifetimes,” Wartski said in the video.
”For her to accuse President Trump of being like Hitler is the worst thing I have ever heard in my 75 years living in the US,” he insisted.
On Wednesday, Harris reacted to recent interviews with Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, in which he claimed that during his time in office the 78-year-old had praised Hitler in private and said “more than once” that the infamous leader of Nazi Germany “did some good things.” Trump’s team has denied the claim.
The Democratic nominee said that it is “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler.” Kelly’s comments are “a window into who Donald Trump really is,” she added. Later that same day, Harris branded her opponent as “a fascist,” a would-be dictator and an admirer of authoritarian figures.
“I know President Trump and he would never say this. And Kamala Harris knows that. She owes my parents and everybody else who was murdered by Hitler an apology for repeating this lie,” Wartski stressed.
Jews should vote for the Republican candidate on November 5 because “he has always stood with the Jewish people and the state of Israel,” he said.
Trump said earlier this week that Harris is “increasingly raising her rhetoric, going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler” because she “sees that she is losing, and losing badly.”
The final national poll by the New York Times and Siena College, which was published on Friday, suggested that Trump and Harris were tied 48% to 48% for the popular vote. A similar survey conducted by SSRS for CNN also found the two to be polling neck-and-neck, at 47% to 47%.